A couple weeks ago, Karl Rove had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he asserted that “Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history,” and argued that the Senator will have to set his reticence aside and open up to American voters if he wants to win in November. Rove has a point regarding what the electorate will want, and what stories are important for Sen. McCain to tell in the course of making his case to the voters; but what I think he fails to understand is that it’s not just a matter of being a naturally private person, as if he just needed to overcome his embarrassment and brag a little more. Sen. McCain’s reticence, I believe, goes to the heart of who he is.In the first place, it seems to me that he has a real aversion to making political capital out of things that are truly meaningful to him. The stories he’s told about his life during this campaign have been stories he’s told to explain himself, to help people understand him, not to make himself look good or play on voters’ emotions. Clearly, he would prefer to inspire voters by talking about honor, duty, patriotism and courage, not by bragging about what a wonderful person he is; the stories he’s told about himself have tended to be self-deprecating rather than self-exalting. Similarly, though by any normal definition you’d have to call Sen. McCain an evangelical conservative (and one with a strong personal testimony, at that), he’s been very resistant to leading with his faith, preferring to duck such questions or answer them sidelong. I respect that; I think using one’s faith for political gain, turning Jesus into a means to an end, is spiritually a risky thing at best. That said, however, running for office is an act of self-communication; if your relationship with Jesus is at the core of who you are and why you believe and do what you believe and do, then you have to tell people that in a way that they’ll understand. Though I think his theology is notably off at points, I don’t think he deserves the skepticism he’s received from other evangelicals; if he wants their active, involved support rather than just (most of) their votes, he’s going to need to find a way to make that clear.Second, I believe there’s another issue as well with regard to Sen. McCain’s military experience. I think I’ve written about this somewhere (though I can’t find it), but having grown up in a military family, I’ve spent a lot of time around combat veterans, some of whom were Vietnamese POWs. In all that time, I’ve noticed a clear pattern in the kind of stories I hear and the kind I don’t. I hear funny stories, and stories that show what a sharp pilot Commander X was, or how good a shiphandler Captain Y was; I hear stories as object lessons about leadership and doing your job right, and sometimes I hear stories about fellow officers sold up the river by the politicians. What I do not hear, and have never heard, are stories about the blood and guts of combat (for lack of a better phrase). My brother was with my father when he went to the Wall, and saw him break down; I have never seen that side of his experience, and I would be surprised if I ever do. Because, you see, I have never been there; I don’t understand, and I can’t.From my own observations, combat veterans rarely talk about that kind of thing except among their own, with those who don’t need to be told how it was because they already understand, because they, too, were there. That’s why I never trusted John Kerry, because he was the kind of man who could make political capital out of his medals, and out of turning on those with whom he had served; which told me that he’d only gone into the military for what he could get out of it. Fundamentally, he was a political officer, someone who had put on the uniform as a politician, and such people are not to be trusted.Sen. McCain, by contrast, went into the service for very different reasons, and served out of very different motives; and though he, too, went into politics after returning to civilian life, he has made very different (and much more limited) use of his military career in the pursuit of his political goals. Karl Rove is asking him to change that, and to cross a line that I suspect he might find not only difficult but even somewhat dishonorable to cross. I think Rove is right, that his campaign will need to find a way to do that if they’re going to run successfully; but I also think it might be asking too much of the Senator himself to tell those stories. Maybe their best option would be to get folks like Col. Bud Day to cris-cross the country and tell them for him.
