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Honor, ambition and McCain

By Chris Satullo
Inquirer Columnist
Posted on Thu, Oct. 16, 2008

We humans have this thing we do that psychologists call projection.

It has nothing to do with that equipment Barack Obama got for the planetarium in Chicago.

What is projection?

Let’s say there’s something about you for which, deep down, you feel shame.

It could be something you do, or feel, or think. Whatever it is, you hate yourself for it. And that is painful.

To ease that pain, to exorcise that guilt, you are driven to “project” the shameful trait onto other people, and to call them out on it.

The guiltier you feel, the more ferocious you’ll be in attacking others for the very thing you most hate about yourself. Eventually, so fierce will be your need to project that you won’t care whether the accusations you’re making are even remotely true.

There, I’ve just explained for you the current state of John McCain’s campaign for the presidency of the United States.

You know, the one that has spent the last weeks fomenting its dwindling cohort of supporters to wish ill on Barack Obama and to call him a “terrorist” and “evil,” then rears up to accuse Obama of running “the dirtiest campaign in American history.”

The one that, while representing a party that just spent the last eight years trying to turn the Department of Justice into a partisan election tool, howls that Obama plans massive election fraud. (This because, back in the day in Chicago, he worked with a community organizing group named ACORN, which just blew the whistle on itself for turning in some phony registrations,)

It’s also the campaign that runs ads against Obama titled “Dishonorable.”

You know how important honor is to McCain, the scion of a fabled military family. If you know his biography well, you know that it includes episodes where he failed to live up to his exaggerated sense of his own honor, then spent years sincerely but showily atoning for the failures. He failed his sense of himself at the Hanoi Hilton. He failed it during the Keating 5 scandal. He failed it by his pandering on the Confederate flag during the 2000 campaign.

What used to be likable and admirable about John McCain was the energy he put into useful atonement: normalizing relations with Vietnam, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, his original immigration reform bill (which he’s now repudiated).

Now, he has sadly turned into a typical candidate of the party of Karl Rove, the new GOP, the party of Grotesque, Outrageous Projection.

We can now look forward to the day, after he’s lost this election by what is increasingly looking like a landslide, when Sen. McCain will announce that he “deeply regrets” the things that “some in his campaign” did during the final weeks when it was all falling apart: the race-baiting, the summoning of the worst demons of the American soul, the absurd, desperate mud-slinging, the dishonorable lies.

He’ll tell us how disappointed he is at how such a fabulously honorable guy as himself got involved in such sleazy stuff. He’ll talk about how much he wants to atone for all of it, gee, perhaps by running for president again in 2012.

And America will tell him to shut up and wander off into some corner where he can mutter to himself about duty, service and honor.

Because, in the last eight weeks, he had his big test, his final chance to rise above, to show honor and character, to truly put country ahead of self.

He failed it miserably. Instead of soaring into the rare and difficult air, he ran in the mud with the baying dogs.

It’s tragic, in the truest Aristotelian sense of the word, for this is a man who has loved his country and served it well. But he is undone, because he loved his ambition more.

© Copyright 2008 Philly Online, LLC

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/Chris_Satullo_Honor_ambition_and_McCain.html

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