Superstition ain’t the way

June 24, 2008

I’ve heard a lot about how superstitious John McCain is, but I’m a little surprised that he’d tell the building that houses his campaign offices to redo their elevator labels like this. (via Mark Kleiman)

For the lowdown on McCain’s economic plan, we turn to Doug Holtz-Eakin, the bearded, balding former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, now McCain’s chief economic advisor. We meet at campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., in a conference room on the M floor — M for McCain. (M is one above 12. The whole floor was renamed and relabeled by the campaign, right down to the buttons on the elevators. McCain is superstitious, his spokeswoman explained; it’s a fighter-pilot thing. But isn’t M the 13th letter in the … ? Never mind.)

I’m not sure if it’s a “fighter-pilot thing,” so much as it’s a bizarre thing.

Consider what we’ve learned about McCain’s superstitions:

* McCain believes it’s bad luck for someone to hand him a salt shaker.

* McCain believes it’s bad luck to throw a hat onto a bed.

* McCain regularly carries 31 cents in lucky change in his pocket.

* McCain carries a lucky feather, a lucky compass, a lucky penny, a lucky nickel, a lucky quarter, and a laminated four-leaf clover.

* McCain believes it’s bad luck to pick up a coin if it isn’t heads up.

* McCain’s been known to have an aide carry his lucky pen at all times.

And now he’s having the elevator labels changed in his campaign’s building. I have no idea how the typical person responds to this, but I find it kind of odd.

Honestly it all just sounds old-fashioned to me. Peasant-like.

Definitely not “fighter-pilot.”

  • The M=13 thing is, of course, code from the Marijuana Party, and shows that McCain is planning to legalise all drugs as soon as he’s elected … which should simultaneously improve relations with Latin America, create a new & highly profitable industrial segment in the USA, and free up lots of prisoners for service in the army, conveniently just in time to invade Iran.

  • Isn’t this the second time you’ve given this headline to a post? Not that I mind, but I suspect it’s bad luck.

  • Honestly it all just sounds old-fashioned to me

    Old-fashioned as in tarot cards? Believing a full moon causes lunacy perhaps? To me old fashioned is curing hiccups with sugar and vinegar.

  • My husband was a fighter pilot in the Navy. I never heard him or any of his friends express any of these superstitions (or any others, for that matter). Of course, none of them lost 3 planes, either.

  • Perhaps just before he debates Obama in the fall we should each mail him a salt shaker.

  • Or maybe one of the ‘issue focused’ debate moderators could just ask Obama to pass a salt shaker to McCain…

  • McCain regularly carries 31 cents in lucky change in his pocket. McCain carries a lucky feather, a lucky compass, a lucky penny, a lucky nickel, a lucky quarter, and a laminated four-leaf clover.

    His pockets must make a lot of noise.

  • Sheesh – carrying around all that stuff must leave no room for concentrating on anything else…no wonder he can’t keep track of what he thinks about things.

  • My mother warned about old men who jingle their change/keys in their pockets… that’s not the only thing their playing with!

  • sounds like false-idol worship to me. Any Evangelicals who’d vote for this heathen is a f***ing hypocrite who will be amongst those “left behind.” Don’t condemn yourself. Obama ’08!

  • McCain is making so many basic campaign errors, I’m not surprised he thinks like this.

  • That’s a good point, slappy. A lot of Christians look down on these particular kind of superstitions, seeing them as a lack of faith in God.

  • When McJowls comes to town, just throw salt on the road in front of his motorcade. Better yet, throw salt AT his motorcade. Great big blue canisters of salt. Pre-soaked in water to the point of total saturation so they rupture and stick to the windows I want to see McJowls go berserk inside an SUV, flopping around like a mad jackrabbit trying to get away from the snake that’s got him by the hind leg.

    The horror……….the horror……….oh, the humanity!!!

  • Oh, Grampa McCain! You crack me up! This reminds me of “the time I took the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.” Now, on what floor were your campaign headquarters?

  • The McCain campaign should run with this! I could see a new campaign slogan:

    “McCain: All this sh*t, and he’s still not as crazy as Bush”

  • How Senator John McCain brought the horse-and-buggy back, renounced militarism and became President: a fanciful tale:

    A few days after Senator John McCain’s proposal for a three-hundred million dollar prize or bounty for a super auto battery was generally derided in the media and on the internet, he made a new proposal. He offered a three hundred dollar cash prize to anyone who could produce a low-cost and environmentally-green form of personal transportation.

    Several hours after he made this offer public, he claimed his prize himself. He decided that a hay-fed and oats-fed horse pulling a light-weight buggy would fill the bill perfectly. He called it the McCain Horse-and-buggy transportation system. At first, folks were skeptical, but after being hammered with gas costing upwards of four dollars a gallon, they were ready for some real change. Change they could believe in. Horse-and-buggies they could believe in. Back to the good old horse-and-buggy days? No, forward to the new improved groovy environmentally-green horse-and-buggy days.

    Folks across this great land decided that it was finally time to give up on their SUVs, and other vehicles powered by gasoline, diesel fuel or other oil derivatives. They began to lay out horse pastures, build barns, and storage areas for horses, buggies, sleighs, winter hay and other related things used back in the mid-19th century for ground transportation. Hay lofts came into vogue again. Farmers in the Midwest gave up growing corn for ethanol production and switched to growing oats for horses. People would say, “And that ain’t hay” and “Get a horse” in their conversations with their neighbors.

    Senator John McCain was riding high on his new found popularity. He realized that if America returned to the ground transportation used in the mid-19th century, that there would be little need for a large imperial U. S. army and navy to steal and secure oil resources abroad. So he renounced militarism, turned his back on his family’s three generations of service in the navy and looked to his 19th century farmer-ancestors for inspiration. McCain became vastly more popular with his renunciation of militarism.

    Kids were demanding cooked rolled oats as their breakfast cereal to be solidarity with horses. America started a long transformation from a car and truck-based economy to a traditional 19th economy based on horse-drawn vehicles and the reliable iron horse (trains). Our dependence on foreign oil and even domestic oil rapidly declined. As we withdrew our overseas military forces from around the world, terrorist attacks rapidly declined. Senator McCain surpassed the charismatic Barack Obama in popularity and became President. Then Barack knew exactly how Hillary felt when she was passed by him back in the Democratic primary elections in early 2008.

  • If he were really superstitious he wouldn’t be renting the 13th floor at all.

    I’ve seen floor re-named for their occupants before. But then again, I live in Silicon Valley. We rename everything for whoever is currently residing.

  • In response to #5, McCain didn’t lose 3 airplaines. He lost 5 airplanes. A couple of them while hotdogging like the immature person that he is!

  • It’s no wonder his campaign is doing so badly. Every fool knows it’s *21* cents you’re supposed to be carrying, not 31 (inflation notwithstanding), 21 being the result of multiplying two lucky numbers (3 and 7).

    And, Danp, @4; to cure hiccups, you have to drink water upside down (yeah, I haven’t figured out how to do it, either. Burp)

  • superstition
    1 a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition 2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary

    Sounds like the McCain campaign to me.

  • A person with so many superstitions should be disbarred from running for any office, leave alone Presidency.

  • John McCain thinks it’s bad luck to invade any country that doesn’t start with the letters I-R-A.

  • “A fighter pilot thing” , I love that……..a variation on the POW theme shows some imagination….but he wasn’t much of a successful pilot , was he ?

  • His superstitions must bother wingnut evangelicals. Can you imagine the conversations going on about it? “He obviously has very little faith in God if he’s depending on all these ‘charms’. Charms? John McCain is into witchcraft!”

  • McCain sounds superstitious. How does Obama feel about virgin births, sky gods, sky gods. kids, talking to imaginary beings and stuff like that? Oh he believes in it. Hmmm.

  • OK, so we’ve got to figure a way to use this at a town hall debate. I say ask him to accept a salt shaker at a debate to prove he’s not superstitious, but he’ll pretend it could be anthrax, and the whole professional outrage brigade will spout shrill as steam whistles for days. What then? I don’t know a lot of superstitions. Is there something you can say in his presence that is bad luck? Wear a T-shirt with the latitude and longitdue of where he was held captive? Maybe a whole bunch of people in the audience with 13s on their shirts?

  • It sounds as if McCain has OCD which manifests itself in superstitious beliefs.

  • Mr. Sayre, the horse-and-buggy thing won’t work for McCain. The Amish have been doing it for centuries. The Amish are notorious pacifists who believe in actually doing a day’s work for a day’s wages.

    How many days of work has McCain blown off this year alone? Last year? The year before?

    The Amish would probably cook him, throw him in with the slop, and feed him to the pigs….

  • It is odd, for sure. But all things being equal, there is nothing there that would give me pause about voting for the man for public office. Of course there is more to McCain than superstition and what’s there is plenty reason not to vote for him.

  • There are two types of luney Republican’ts (rather than the just greedy).

    One is the theocratic wingnuts (BGII and so on).

    The other is the astrological wingnuts (Nancy Reagan and John Sidney McCain).

    Note the later favor stem cell research and the former do not.

    It’s a sick little coalition.

  • Superstitions are an attempt to assert control over something that is out of one’s control. He might believe in them more than the average person because he spent so much time while a POW in a situation where others controlled all aspects of his experience, including life and death. He perhaps still believes in these things because they make him feel better, calmer. Things that do that perpetuate themselves because they are avoidance behaviors. As long as nothing bad happens to him while carrying his lucky charm, the behavior will continue because it has obviously worked — nothing bad happened. So, they wouldn’t extinguish over time but would get stronger and generalize (according to learning theory).

    We all engage in superstitious behavior. Other people’s superstitions look funny or quaint to you, but I don’t think there are any people who don’t do some of this stuff. If you want to know what your own superstitious behavior is, just live with someone new. All the little changes they make in the way you do things will make you so uncomfortable that they will become the source of friction and arguments. That’s why people get upset over whether TP sheets unroll from the top or the bottom of the roll. It feels bad if someone does it “wrong.” The dynamic is no different when superstitions are codified into folk wisdom or shared by families.

    Make fun of McCain if you want, but you are mainly attacking him for being a human being. I wish things could stick to the political — there is enough of that to criticize. We are all guilty of being human around here, even Obama.

  • They say it is a fighter pilot thing to make it seem harmless, even noble. What it is, is an ignorance thing and there’s nothing either noble or harmless about being ignorant.

  • My superstition is I consider it really bad luck to vote for anyone named John McCain in 2008.

  • Bad luck to put a hat on the bed? Bad luck to pick up a tails-up penny? That’s not being superstitious, that’s being Irish. I was brought up believing the same bunch of hokum, courtesy of my Mick granddad. To this day my mother flips out if she sees a hat on my bed.

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