Honey, they shrunk the candidate. It has been a sadness to watch John McCain, a towering figure in US politics, diminished by the campaign trail and by the errors he has made along the way. The nominee who stands before America today is a very different creature to the prospective candidate I interviewed for The Spectator in 2006. McCain’s whole mission then – and one which made him identify with David Cameron – was to stretch a hand out to non-Republican voters, to ditch the Bush-Rove strategy of wooing the “base” above all else.
Lest we forget: McCain was one of the first politicians of the Right to engage sensibly and proactively with the issue of climate change. Though a hawk with the sharpest claws, he understood completely how grave was the damage wrought to America’s moral authority by Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and fought hard with the White House to outlaw the torture of terror suspects. He rose above the tribal confines of party to work with Democrats such as Teddy Kennedy and (before he became an independent) Joe Lieberman. Hard as it now is to believe, John Kerry offered John McCain the vice-presidential slot on the Democrat ticket in 2004.
How far the Senator for Arizona travelled between that moment and 2008, when he himself chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. It looked clever but, as Sidney Blumenthal writes in today’s Guardian, it also made it hard for McCain to argue that he was not a “core” conservative or, indeed, to attack Obama as inexperienced. His mishandling of the economic crisis and the congressional row that followed finished him off. In this sad story of diminution lies a terrible warning to Cameron and Brown about what a campaign can do to a candidate. This will not be McCain’s day, and it was his last chance to become President. But, amid the Obamania of the coming days, do not forget the extraordinary contribution this great American has made to his country, to international relations and to the free world.
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