CAPTAIN McCAIN

...He may be 14 years Hillary’s junior, but his roots in radicalism are surprisingly similar to hers as an acolyte of Alinsky and a defender of Black Panthers both at the Yale Law School and at a left-wing (viz...

...The younger generation’s 46-yearold candidate with the rants of the Rev...

...Senator McCain brings with his candidacy a life spent in public service, on which I shall presently elaborate with insights from Grover Norquist, former Solicitor General Ted Olson, and another longtime AmSpec colleague, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman...

...Years later in Chicago, while serving with Obama in foundation work, Ayers was brazenly Obama has been a political hustler throughout his adult life...

...Norquist, who at the time had an ongoing disagreement with the senator over tax cuts, left the dinner particularly pleased...

...Morale was dreadful...

...In this, friendship with John has been similar to my old friendship with Ronald Reagan—though when I disagreed with Reagan I was always wrong...

...In the campaign ahead one of McCain’s most worrisome weaknesses is his reluctance to brag...

...He also alluded to her 1990s controversies...

...Through all the primaries and the months of Republican decline, McCain has survived as conservatism’s best candidate against the phony herald of change now sermonizing for the Democrats...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama began to let the air out of Hillary’s inevitability while speaking in Iowa last November...

...Perhaps mainstream media will be as slow in catching on to Obama as they were to catching on to Hillary...

...Now Norquist is supporting the McCain campaign...

...Disagreements aside, McCain basically stands with us...

...I got to know him best in the late 1980s and 1990s, before I became, shall we say, distracted by the Clintons...

...He has proved himself,” Norquist says, “to be the best candidate in the primaries...

...Lehman, I am sure, has also had his disagreements with John, but now the Reaganite secretary of the Navy who built the 600-ship naval force is supporting John...

...Recently an Obama adviser told the New York Review of Books’ Elizabeth Drew that “[h]is being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign,” whereupon Drew enthuses that this piece of 1960s nonsense is “a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern...

...At this writing it appears that my old friend has patched up his differences with the conservative rank and file, most of whom also understand that a President Obama would be bad for the economy, bad for social legislation, catastrophic for the courts, and a Carter II in foreign policy...

...unrepentant...

...He had suffered two broken arms, a broken leg, a broken shoulder, and the consequences of stab wounds to the groin and ankle—none of which had properly healed while he was being tortured by the North Vietnamese...

...While doing so he fell in with senior movement conservatives such as Sen...

...Obama is sufficiently vain to think he can dupe his supporters by presenting his radical origins as progressive, not “the status quo in Washington...

...This is one of the things I have admired in John...

...Postal Service...

...Then in 1982 he won a House seat...

...Does it matter which one will preside over next spring’s White House Easter Egg Roll—if there is to be another Easter Egg Roll...

...Pennsylvania Avenue, with particular focus on Sen...

...In 1978 Carter became the first president to veto a defense bill, doing so because it included an aircraft carrier that he opposed...

...Now even mainstream journalists are reporting it (see the May 19, 2008, Washington Post) upon detecting hypocrisy in her attack on Obama’s friendship with Bill Ayers...

...The Senate Ethics Committee let him off lightly, finding his relation to Keating merely “questionable...

...To my surprise everyone walked away pleased by the evening...

...Moreover, whereas the Republican backsliders on the Hill have deceived us, McCain has been forthright in his disagreements with us...

...In fact, immediately after 9/11 he announced, “I don’t regret setting bombs...

...It is right out of the playbook of Saul Alinsky, Hillary’s 1960s radical guru...

...With some anomalies, McCain’s platform will be an amalgam of their work...

...Then there is one thing more...

...He remembers today asking him for his support on the Paycheck Protection initiative to prevent California unions from taking a bite from unwilling workers’ paychecks for their own political use...

...My admiration has endured through our disagreements over such things as immigration, campaign finance, and now global warming...

...I suggest he get the word out...

...Moreover, there are federal judicial appointments to make, a war on terror to fight, and extravagant government spending to be scotched...

...Olson left the dinner, he recalls, “impressed by his knowledge and insight across a broad range of questioning...

...Lehman had just become secretary of J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 1 9 c a P t a I n M c c a I n the Navy...

...A bipartisan Senate group including the famous Cold War Democrat Sen...

...John McCain...

...Spectator readers have been aware of Hillary’s 1960s radicalism since the magazine’s earliest reports in 1992...

...Turbs of Washington...

...McCain became Navy liaison to the Senate and in that capacity endeavored to improve procurement and living standards for military personnel...

...Drug abuse within the ranks was rampant...

...McCain’s public service, however, is not of the kind bragged about by so many conventional Washington figures, which is to say, a life of personal hustle, shameless self-promotion, but with one’s muzzle deep in the public trough and one’s paw 1 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Captain McCain outstretched to every passing lobbyist...

...McCain, from his liaison office, was critical to this legislation...

...My admiration for McCain began in those days when I recognized him as profoundly serious about the most deadly threats to the country...

...It means that by the mid-1980s Obama was going into poor neighborhoods and organizing anger, channeling it into still more welfare and more government programs, perhaps late-night basketball games (once beheld as an enlightened antidote to urban crime), medical and psychiatric clinics, perhaps curbside aerobics—but little that would grow the economy and create jobs sustainable in the free market...

...McCain has managed billion-dollar budgets, commanded a 75-aircraft squadron, and shaped historic legislation—all before entering politics...

...The young officer who had just been so effectual in reviving the military rejected the stars, stars his father and grandfather had won...

...Then, too, he is always good company, quick to laugh, quick with an irreverent joke, but fundamentally serious...

...Then he replaced the retiring Senator Goldwater...

...He wanted “McCain has proved himself to be the best candidate in as he said, “to stay as long as the questions last...

...Wright and other antique radicals whistling in his ears is going to give the left wing youth of the 1960s one more run against their right-wing rivals...

...Interviewed for this piece, Lehman told me of one of their earlier disagreements that reveals the senator’s peculiar sense of public service...

...It is in Obama’s origins as a “community organizer” that we see how truly passé he is...

...I think it does matter...

...We know where he stands...

...Our economy is fragile and unlikely to be strengthened by the Democrats’ promised panaceas: higher taxes, more government regulators, more bureaucrats, and a lunge at the country’s health providers with the intent of transforming them into the efficiency experts at the U.S...

...Ted Olson, the former solicitor general, feared we were imposing on the senator’s time, but John insisted on returning, for he wanted, 2 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 R. emmett tyrrell, Jr...

...I feel we didn’t do enough...

...Ironically, and notwithstanding McCain’s waywardness, he is conservatism’s best chance to win the White House, for he can attract Reagan Democrats and independents...

...But this was post-Vietnam, and, as with so many other sectors of the military, “Skipper” McCain’s squadron was short on parts and maintenance crews...

...Norquist also argues that John has settled down as a tax cutter—he certainly struck me as a tax cutter in the Reagan years—and will hold firm “against the labor and trial lawyers’ agenda...

...Suspicion that Obama is a reincarnation of Carter increases my interest in a McCainObama matchup...

...Yet the experience made McCain cognizant of the costs of President Jimmy Carter’s economizing...

...the primaries...

...Some 25 of his 75 aircraft were permanently disabled “hangar queens...

...John agreed to support the initiative and was as good as his word...

...I can do more to help the country there...

...Taking one issue with another, McCain is a conservative and a man of honor...

...Public service for McCain began in the United States Navy following the exemplary careers of his father and grandfather...

...Sent kind of public service than that of “the - r e f d a s i t s i l e H . e c r e l ub p o e f l a en i ator f obam ic a s too v i brings c w a ith m hi i s candi i d f acy status quo in Washington,” though it looks like status quo Washington to me—at least as lived by the Clintons, the Gores, and every Kennedy ever heard of...

...McCain got them all up and running...

...John, find a dramatist among the Republican image consultants to present your extraordinary life of service as the heroic narrative that it is...

...Is there, as the political philosophers might inquire, a dime’s worth of difference between these presidential contenders...

...Yet being a “community organizer” in the late 20th century is sooooo 1960s...

...John Tower and with young 1960s movement conservatives such as Dick Allen, later Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Ed Feulner, later the head of the Heritage Foundation, and John Lehman, President Reagan’s secretary of the navy...

...Looking back on McCain’s revival of his squadron, Lehman, a friend of his from the 1970s, assesses it “a near miracle of leadership and management...

...McCain, then a young naval officer, developed the shrewd political instincts that have served him well through 26 years of political campaigns...

...In politics humility is not a virtue...

...My prediction that the 2008 presidential race will be the last great battle between the 1960s left and the 1960s right is holding up, though the standard-bearer from the left is by 1960s demographics wet behind the ears and the standard-bearer from the right is long in the tooth...

...He was also ardent for ethics in government, having been personally stung by his inclusion in the “Keating Five...

...law firm...

...Balanced again i a d i a c d w p e e a a m b s s h e e e ra O ce a ahea a d s is d going ly t fl o a be e tight n . d John te F w un th d Obama’s flaws, however, is the anti-Republican climate created by the Republican dullards on Capitol Hill...

...T t s more bad-news days ahead...

...There he sniped at the front-runner for being, as the Washington Times reported, “locked in 1960s social and cultural battles...

...Last year in Owith a résumé very similar to the Clintons’ , a r oc De r i l - f e s - d d a t s a s i bviously n to a r the i s k u een le po t lit be ical a l eye, m Obam t a , The Clinton Crack-Up I predicted that the younger generation of Democrats would challenge Hillary’s nomination and that 2008 would be the last battle between the left wing and the right wing of the historic 1960s generation...

...Many conservatives have been understandably critical of some of the Arizona senator’s feints to the Kultursmog, but for the most part he is conservative, a maverick conservative yet one who will be campaigning on a platform shaped 1 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Returning from five and a half years of torture R . e M M e t t t y R R e l l , J R . and unattended wounds, Lt...

...I have never had any problem disagreeing with him...

...Something is wrong here...

...At times I wonder about Miss Drew’s inability to slap her thigh and let out a hearty belly laugh...

...After an hour of tough questions John left briefly for a vote on the Senate floor, but he returned to stand for over an hour answering still more questions across a wide range of subjects...

...Cmdr...

...He will run well with Hispanics,” Norquist believes, “and will prevent them from moving en bloc to the other team...

...Henry Jackson and Tower successfully opposed much of the mischief of Carter’s veto and in 1979 passed the Nunn-Warner bill raising military pay and living standards and beginning the long revival of the military that in the Reagan years bankrupted the Soviet Union...

...These were grim days for those of us who thought the Cold War could be lost by the Wonderboy’s inane moralizing...

...All support him today...

...As the senator had crossed swords with some of the invitees in recent years, there were premonitions of the OK Corral in the air...

...Barack H. Obama, who has represented Illinois in the Senate since beating a former AmSpec summer intern, Alan Keyes, in 2004...

...Yet, that experience bore heavily on his mind...

...By now the military budget was so gutted that aside from parts and maintenance shortages, salaries were near the poverty level...

...Yet in a show of exemplary fortitude he undertook grueling physical therapy and proved the doctors wrong...

...What the military calls “flight status” was beyond him...

...His opponent will apparently be Sen...

...It was February 1981...

...Obama has been a political hustler throughout his adult life, so much so that by the end of his 2004 election to the Senate he was sending aides to Iowa to test his presidential prospects...

...Hillary at least respected her supporters’ intelligence enough by four decades of the modern conservative movement’s policy desiderata...

...Lehman objected, telling him he was certain to be promoted to admiral in the autumn and was on track to reach four stars...

...Coming back from the National Rifle Association meeting, where I saw the Straight Talker impress the gun slingers, I was informed by one of the Republican Party’s finest campaign strategists that, though the campaign’s foreign policy staff is competent, its domestic policy staff is disorganized and slow to respond to the exigencies of the campaign trail...

...He spent eight years as an Illinois state senator, and before that he was a “community organizer...

...Before that he spent eight years as an Illinois state senator, and before that he was a “community organizer...

...A parallel between Jimmy’s famed rebuke of us for our “inordinate fear of Communism” and Obama’s recent rationalizing that rogue states pursuing nuclear weaponry are “tiny compared to the Soviet Union” does spring to mind...

...Struggling against the “inevitable” 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, Sen...

...It demonstrated managerial skills that he has yet to was also during the Carter administration that he It was during the carter administration that brag about, managerial and leadership skills that Obama gives no evidence of possessing...

...Remember, our nation’s Muslims might object, and also our Hindus and maybe even the ACLU...

...Tough and mature, he is conservatism’s best chance to win the White House against a passé “community organizer” and standard-issue left-liberal Democrat...

...It touched on his sense of honor, and though he is given to easy laughter and irreverent jokes, this third-generation American hero has a strong sense of honor...

...Captain McCain dropped by his office to tell him he was quitting to run for Congress...

...Humility has no place in modern politics...

...It was during this period, from 1978 into the early 1980s, that he met and worked with such conservatives as Tower, Allen, and Lehman...

...albeit without the shattered integrity...

...He is the Republican contender, having for the past 22 years repre- My fellow spectatorians, whether sented Arizona in the Senate from the very seat that Barry Goldwater vacated...

...Ironically, though the younger generation has whipped Clinton, my prediction is being vindicated...

...I had known Lehman - ub s i n g r i V n r e t r o e h i e o h ’ a m e L his h was n a s bou m t th n e t time N tha h t I met M i cC a ain at through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a major institution of the young conservative movement, and from reading his national security articles...

...Major weapons programs were being canceled...

...you be conservative, libertarian, or a lively blend, let us consider the next most likely residents of 1600 By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...My estimate is that an Obama presidency would be an amusing approximation of the Carter administration, complete with vaporous moralizing and foreign policy bungling...

...is the founder and editor-inchief of The American Spectator and author most recently of The Clinton Crack-Up (Thomas Nelson...

...Well, J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 1 7 c a P t a I n M c c a I n he has hoodwinked Miss Drew...

...McCain was told by the doctors that he would never be able to fly combat aircraft again...

...He next took command of the Navy’s largest squadron, flying A-7 attack aircraft requiring a budget of more than a billion dollars...

...The rudderless Republicans have lost both houses of Congress and will probably lose more seats in the autumn, as they continue their spending revels and their tergiversations from Reagan conservatism...

...Toughened and matured by Vietnam, he returned to America and, as we shall see, took on the Carter administration’s neglect of the military...

...Communist...

...With John one can disagree but remain a friend...

...to enter Congress, saying, as Lehman recalls: “The Navy’s in good shape, but I have never seen such a f---ed up organization as Congress...

...Also, the McCain campaign needs to be improved...

...to lie about her origins...

...McCain, as the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus recently observed, is a member of the 1950s generation but with a rebellious streak...

...Note she is not talking about governing a Chicago slum but rather the United States of America...

...Still, in the months ahead John McCain needs to speak more to his base and reassure its members...

...Hillary at least respected her supporters’ intelligence enough to lie about her origins...

...John was pretty much a Reaganite conservative, especially when it came to pork and to overweening government officials, whether in government or on Capitol Hill...

...In the heady days of the 1960s Revolution That Never Came, Ayers was bombing government buildings, among them the Pentagon...

...Enlisted men were on food stamps...

...Obama has risen from obscurity by promising to banish politics from politics, though politics is about all he has ever done...

...Confident and even cocky as he might appear, he is out to do good for the country...

...That was a mere four years ago...

...Three years ago I invited him to one of AmSpec’s monthly editorial dinners (the Saturday Evening Club, as it is called, though it never meets on Saturdays and is not a club) with conservative journalists and movement conservatives in attendance such as David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform...

...breathtaking vanity is...